Reviews

Discussion

A really clever app that lets you read news articles in English as it reinforces your language learning in other languages. I've worked in EdTech and one of the challenges is finding a way to reinforce new learning habits by building upon existing daily habits – like reading The Guardian. Yarn Vocabulary strikes a good blend of passive and active learning and the app is a welcome addition to my collection of lifelong learning apps.

@iwozzy Thanks for your kind words, Paul! We actually looked at a Chrome extension route initially, but realised we couldn't support mobile that way so went for React Native, thinking we could deploy to multiple mobile platforms. Then we realised that customising each mobile OS's browser would take a load of work, so focused our skunkworks resource on iOS (Safari) only. Even that was a serious challenge tbh and took weeks of debugging.

The starting point for Yarn was trying to make improving a foreign language as effortless and fun as possible. As someone who struggles to keep up my Japanese studies here in London, the app scratches a personal itch. Key challenges have been building a vocabulary-difficulty analytics solution (so we can prompt study of words of appropriate difficulty) and then customising iOS Safari to highlight target vocabulary inline and so on. Hopefully the end result allows the user not to even notice all of that and just enjoy reading The Guardian as they keep improving their target foreign language.